Politicians
and activists often abuse it to push for moral panic and punitive
laws. We constantly heard the word “victim”. People in power
realized that they cannot criminalize victims, since one cannot be
both a criminal and a victim at the same time.
Sex
workers were saying that prostitution should not be criminalized
under any circumstances because it is a form of exploitation. Many
women are in positions of control in the sex industry and that this
was a choice they had made. They were asking who we were “as a
society” to impose something else on them. From my perspective, the
role of the police is to ensure that this consent is real. They need
to have the means to do that, and they do under the Criminal Code.
Beyond that, this is none of our business. We certainly should not
change the fact that people can, according to what they say,
voluntarily choose to work in the sex trade and do so in safety.
Now,
under new laws, there will be no exceptions. The purchase of sexual
services will always be a criminal offense (even though the act in by
itself is legal!); and the justification is always to use fear and
pitch it as a form of humanitarianism to help save
“Trafficked Victims”. The politicians are using sound bites and
shocking stories about human trafficking, which are true, by the way,
to try to tell us that making sex work illegal will address that.
When in-fact certain provisions of the Criminal Code have a grossly
disproportionate effect on persons who engage in prostitution by
putting their health and safety at risk and making them more
vulnerable to violence by taking away their safety net and making the
whole industry go underground. Is that the same argument that we are
hearing from the other side—that no one should trade sex for money,
in order to protect children? Is that argument not indicative of the
deception hidden in these laws? I think the politicians using
children to justify a religious Conservative ideology, according to
which it is wrong to pay for sex?
In
other words the justification to make sex work illegal is to Simply
put, we cannot condone this so-called industry for the benefit of
those individuals who claim to freely choose it, because doing so
would exacerbate the harm experienced by that vulnerable group who
are most at risk of subjection to prostitution, and importantly, do
not choose it. Like WAW, how
stupid do you think a free thinking society is? Instead of tackling
the problem from it's roots just take away our freedoms. So they are
saying that they need to make prostitution illegal because it
is too dangerous and poses too great a harm to those involved, the
communities in which it is practiced, and society at large to
entrench it as a form of work recognized by law
In
other words prostitution laws recognizes that entrenching
prostitution as a legitimate profession by facilitating it through
decriminalization would result in more vulnerable persons being drawn
into it. Politicians do not think this is the type of society to
which we should aspire. My answer to that is who are you to tell
me how to live. if adults who chose it, like to do it, it should
be legal...DICTATED FREEDOMS ARE NOT FREEDOM!
This legislation would drive the trade underground and put at
risk the safety and security of those individuals. The politicians
have failed to look at that point.
Consenting
adults who chose to sell sexual services to other adults should be
legal and not to be confused with exploited underage sex workers with
few options for survival. If you want to talk about child
exploitation then this is a big term and the approach should be
geared towards focusing on social service help and not making the sex
industry illegal and it's definitely not a law enforcement issue.
Children and disadvantaged individuals exploitation is a big term
taking many forms like child laborers in construction, agriculture,
in ship yards and the steal industry...list goes on and on, children
in military, children trained to shop lift, pan handling.....etc and
sex work.
Unfortunately
“Trafficking ” has become a new term for an age old problem which
is largely a teenage runaway from abusive situations at home and who
sell sex to survive; are considered “Trafficking” victims by
default under many federal or state/province laws. This is despite
hardly any teen runaways have pimps or traffickers. Most see sex work
as the best way to support themselves on the street given the limited
legal and social service options available for children who run away
from home. And most of these runaways do not travel out of their
town or city, much less out of the country. So in practice,
“Trafficking” does not mean “modern-day-slavery”. Nor does it
mean transported across borders for purpose of sexual exploitation.
Instead it usually refers to one or more of the following: being
under age selling sex, illegally immigrating, being subjected to any
kind of forced labor or abusive labor practices, and now they added
to the list “adults engaging in consensual sex work”.
Do you see the problem here? A free thinker in a free society will
never accept such mediocre hypocrisy nor do I. Freedom it either
exists or it does not. Take away our freedoms by defining boundaries
in which we can be free and you are no longer living in a free
society!
Don't
be ignorant by associating “Human Trafficking / Modern-day-slavery”
with consensual sex work. Does forced prostitution exist? Yes off
course. But the majority of cases prosecuted under the sex
trafficking charges are very very rarely the case of forced
prostitution. However, the media focus only on these cases thus
making you believe that forced prostitution is a problem growing out
of proportion.
The
only thing I can see here when politicians and the media keep
preaching the term “Human Trafficking / Modern-day-slavery” and
associating it with sex work; They are using humanitarianism and
heroism to push a religious conservative ideology being put in place
dictating to the free society how things should be. This scheme has
all the hallmarks of con-artists cheating the non-thinking ignorant
people in order to justify new powers and boundaries being placed on
the free society and condition people to accept the civil liberty
trade-off and the illusion of security and piece of mind.
